Quebec is once again shaken by a controversy involving two conceptions of freedom of expression. The story is nothing original. Let’s admit that it is even banal. Let us recall it briefly. It was enough for a columnist to pronounce the title of the famous book by Pierre Vallières white niggers of america during a radio news program on August 17, 2020 to arouse the – extreme – sensitivity of a “skinned” listener who brandished his wound like a trophy to assert “his right” to ban from the airwaves of public radio the offending word.
His complaint was deemed admissible by the CRTC, which examined it and, in the end, ruled in his favor, as if the federal agency were in a position to estimate the degree of the complainant’s injury, to determine the wrongs suffered in order to demand compensation from the public broadcaster in return, i.e. an apology. Even more surprisingly, the CRTC chopped up the title of Vallières’ opus to decontextualize it and, ultimately, extract a word, the bad word.
We are, there, typically in the zero degree of thought. What an insult to one of our most powerful writers, who in the 1960s offered his compatriots conceptual tools to envisage their condition no longer as dominated subjects, but as free beings aspiring to universal thought !
Bowing to pressure from sectarian minority groups
On closer examination, it would be wrong to reduce this matter to a simple opposition between the CRTC and Radio-Canada. The fact that the highest federal authority responsible for ensuring compliance with the Broadcasting Act sets aside objective criteria in order to base its decision on subjective criteria — by definition arbitrary — should alert us to a much more significant drift that is is installed in our spheres of excellence. After all, if it suffices to wave the victim’s rag to pull the blanket to itself, what will be left of thought and creation? Who is going to determine that one injury is more legitimate than another, more acute than another?
Let’s be honest, let’s face reality. The reasoning of the CRTC built around a figure claiming to be a victim who calls for censorship and banishment has become recurrent in the academic, media, literary and cultural circles. Faced with the hubbub of active minorities, our centers of influence gave in to pressure, forgetting the general interest. On certain subjects, censorship and self-censorship have become almost reflexes of social survival.
Literary works put on the index, university corpus reduced to a trickle, shows and conferences canceled, artists boycotted, teachers banned, secular activists and humanists hunted down. Since the cancellation of SLAVE and of Kanata in the summer of 2018, a stifling atmosphere reigns in Quebec. Powerless were we to defend freedom. As too often, we bet on the strategy of avoidance, hoping to domesticate the dark side of increasingly sectarian protesters.
Disconnected Immigrant Women
This sectarianism has developed mainly in left-wing identity circles, which have reinvented the concept of “race” to make it the new motor of History and to divide our society into as many categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories. categories. To justify the organization of a witch hunt, we opposed the “Whites” to the “racialized”.
The terribly cruel fate reserved for one of our great artists, Betty Bonifassi, is a good illustration of this. In the eyes of these troublemakers, Bonifassi was no more than a “white” performer taking over the songs of slaves, thus making herself guilty of “racist appropriation”. The interpreter, whose intention was to make known to the general public slave songs whose variety and range were not suspected, was accused of plundering their heritage for his own prestige, his own glory. Cancel !
Must our artists and our intellectuals be numb in comfort and indifference to allow such an injustice to occur! Does the societal crisis we are going through have to be deep to indulge us in such guilty silence! The fact that we rushed into this abyss has become a matter of deep concern to me.
How is it possible that the country which opened up all my horizons to me at the end of the nineties can today deprive me of my oxygen: freedom, twenty years later, and this, at a where there has never been so much question of “making minorities visible” and giving women a voice? Obviously, my profile did not correspond to this “minority” to be promoted. This is far from unique, with more and more immigrant women having been “unplugged”.
The public service is not a state media
What does this have to do with this CRTC decision? To tell the truth, during all these years, I understood that Radio-Canada was rather on the same side as the CRTC today. That the public service did not seek to encourage the debate of ideas, but just to promote a certain societal vision, thus becoming, by force of circumstance, a state media.
Admittedly, its major figures are mobilizing today against the totally absurd decision of the CRTC. It is very good. But given the nature of the issue, this is not enough. So that this reaction is not only considered as a simple reflex of corporatist defense, it would be time to carry out a more thorough reflection on the public service. Freedom of expression must not become the privilege of some, but the engine of our collective emancipation.